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Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

Pablo Picasso, 1907

Oil on canvas

243.9 × 233.7 cm, 96 × 92 in

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon in English) is a celebrated painting by Pablo Picasso that depicts five prostitutes in a brothel, in Avignon (Avinyó) Street in Barcelona, though, as usual with Picasso, the name was not given it until well after completion. Picasso painted it in France, and completed it in the summer of 1907. The eye-catching painting is one of Picasso's most famous. It now belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City which acquired it in 1939.^[1]

Picasso created over one hundred sketches and studies in preparation for this work, one of the most important in the early development of Cubism. Within the narrative of early modern art, it is widely held as a seminal work.^[1]

At the time of its first exhibition in 1916, the painting was deemed immoral. Most critics failed to see its resemblance to Cezanne's Les Grandes Baigneuses and El Greco's Opening of the Fifth Seal, two connections much discussed by later commentators. It has also been argued that the painting is in part a reaction to Henri Matisse's Le bonheur de vivre and Blue Nude.^[2]

Picasso drew each of the figures differently. The woman pulling the curtain on the far right has heavy paint application throughout. Her head is the most cubist of all five, featuring sharp geometric shapes. The cubist head of the crouching figure underwent at least two revisions from an Iberian figure to its current state. The masks seem to be derived from African tribal masks. Maurice Vlaminck is often credited with having introduced Picasso to African sculpture of Fang extraction in 1904.^[3]

This 19th century Fang sculpture is similar in style to what Picasso encountered in Paris just prior to Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

A possible inspiration: Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1906, by Paul Cezanne.

Much of the critical debate that has taken place over the years centers on attempting to account for this multiplicity of styles within the work. The dominant understanding for over five decades, espoused most notably by Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and organizer of major career retrospectives for the artist, has been that it can be interpreted as evidence of a transitional period in Picasso's art, an effort to connect his earlier work to Cubism, this style he would help invent and develop over the next five or six years.^[1]

In 1974, however, critic Leo Steinberg in his landmark essay "The Philosophical Brothel" posited a wholly different explanation for the wide range of stylistic attributes. Using the earlier sketches, which were completely ignored by most critics, he argues that, far from evidence of an artist undergoing a rapid stylistic metamorphosis, the variety of styles can be read as a deliberate attempt, a careful plan, to capture the gaze of the viewer. He notes that the five women all seem eerily disconnected, indeed wholly unaware of each other. Rather, they focus solely on the viewer, their divergent styles only furthering the intensity of their glare.^[1]

The earliest sketches of the work actually feature two men inside the brothel, one a sailor and the other a medical student (often depicted holding either a book or a skull, causing Barr and others to read the painting as a memento mori, a reminder of death). A trace of their presence at a table in the center remains: the jutting edge of a table near the bottom of the canvas. The viewer, Steinberg argues, has come to replace the sitting men, forced to confront the gaze of prostitutes head on, invoking readings far more complex than a simple allegory or the autobiographical reading that attempts to understand the work in relation to Picasso's own history with women. A world of meanings then becomes possible, suggesting the work as a meditation on the danger of sex, the "trauma of the gaze" (to use a phrase of Rosalind Krauss's invention), and the threat of violence inherent in the scene and sexual relations at large.^[1]

The reversed gaze, that is, the fact that the figures look directly at the viewer, as well as the idea of the self-possessed woman, no longer there solely for the pleasure of the male gaze, may be traced to Manet's "Olympia" of 1863.^[1]

In July 2007, Newsweek published a two-page, four-column article about Les Demoiselles d'Avignon describing it as the "most influential work of art of the last 100 years".^[4]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Steinberg, L. "The Philosophical Brothel." October, no. 44. (spring 1988): 7–74.
2. ^ Hilton Kramer, "Reflections on Matisse", The New Criterion, November 1992, p. 5
3. ^ Art of the Avant-Gardes. Edwards, Steve and Wood, Paul. page 162
4. ^ Plagens, Peter. Which Is the Most Influential Work of Art of the Last 100 Years?, Art, Newsweek, July 2/July 9, 2007, p. 68-69

• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon on the MoMa website
• Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in the MoMA Online Collection
• An Eye on Art: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
• Art: Picasso's 'Demoiselles'//New York Times
• "A revolution in paint: 100 years of Picasso’s Demoiselles" John Molyneux, International Socialism 115 (summer 2007)

v • d • e Pablo Picasso
Periods	Blue (1901–1904)  • Rose (1904–1906)  • African (1907–1909)  • Cubism (1909–1919)
Lists of works	1889-1900  • 1901-1910  • 1911-1920  • 1921-1930  • 1931-1940  • 1941-1950  • 1951-1960  • 1961-1970  • 1971-1973
Artworks	Chicago Picasso  • Dora Maar au Chat  • Femme aux Bras Croisés  • Garçon à la pipe  • Guernica (painting)  • Jacqueline (painting)  • Le Rêve (painting)  • Les Demoiselles d'Avignon  • Les Noces de Pierrette  • Maya with Doll  • Nude on a black armchair  • The Old Guitarist  • Reading the Letter (Picasso)  • Seated circus performer and boy  • Sylvette  • The Three Dancers  • Three Musicians  • The Weeping Woman  • Woman in Hat and Fur Collar
Partners	Françoise Gilot  • Olga Khokhlova  • Geneviève Laporte  • Dora Maar  • Fernande Oliver  • Marie-Thérèse Walter
Family	Paloma Picasso  • José Ruiz y Blasco
Colleagues	George Braques  • Max Jacob
Museums	Picasso museums  • Château Grimaldi (Antibes)  • Museu Picasso  • Musée Picasso
See also	Surviving Picasso